


The Lucas Archives: George Lucas  - A Life in Letters

by BrendanMLeonard



Category: Star Wars RPF
Genre: Alternate History, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, California, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 19:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10973811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BrendanMLeonard/pseuds/BrendanMLeonard





	The Lucas Archives: George Lucas  - A Life in Letters

_Covers of the first edition cover art for_ The Journal of the Whills  _trilogy. Source: Lucas Archives, University of California - Berkeley._

June 12, 1962. Modesto, California. A month after his eighteenth birthday, would-be hot-rodder George Lucas crashes his car on the way home from the library. Pulled from the wreckage without a heartbeat, Lucas miraculously survives - but is left paralyzed from the waist down and breathing problems that will plague him for the rest of his life.  
  
At Modesto Junior College, Lucas studies anthropology, sociology, and literature. He goes on to get a B.A. in Religious Studies from USC, and, during his college career, he begins to write novels. After publishing a series of short stories, his first novel, _Ordinary Man_ , comes out in 1971. The hard sci-fi novel is well-received but unsuccessful, and Lucas is disappointed at how his publisher treats the work. (Fans maintain that there is still an “original manuscript” out there.) He receives his PhD in English from UCLA the next month.  
  
Lucas accepts a teaching position at Berkeley. Despite his shy, awkward demeanor, his class on comparative mythology and narrative storytelling coincides with the Hollywood New Wave, and becomes one of the most popular courses on campus.  
  
In 1973, Lucas publishes _Come Go With Me_ , an impressionistic, fractured novel based on his Modesto boyhood. His new publisher, Viking, puts their weight behind the novel and it is both a critical and commercial success. The novel is noteworthy for its incorporation of popular songs, either in part or in whole, and its use of real-life figures like Wolfman Jack. Baby Boomers in particular respond to the novel’s sad, haunted tone, and it is considered one of the key texts of the Boomer generation.  
  
_Come Go With Me_ wins the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974, but is short-listed for the Pulitzer later that year. Lucas uses some of his royalties to start his own small company, LucasArts, to find “new ways to tell the stories that unite us” and to “liberate artists from commercial constraints.” These include the publishing arm, Illuminated Literature  & Media, or ILM.  
  
He then turns to what will be his magnum opus - a “space fantasy” for children that incorporates the fiction of his boyhood with his obsession for universal stories. What he delivers in 1976 is beyond what Viking expects - a nearly 2000 page manuscript entitled _The Journal of the Whills_. While the novel’s through-line is simple - a boy, a girl, and a galaxy - the surrounding text is dense and haunted, littered with flashbacks to all that has come before. You can feel the weight of thousands of years on every page, with grand castles, desolate landscapes, and rank bars. But Lucas is deft at characterization and action sequences, crafting thrilling battles and his own mythology based around the Jedi Knights.  
  
Still, Viking balks at publishing such a thick novel, especially one geared towards children. They suggest breaking the novel up into three books, one to be published every couple of years. Lucas insists “it’s all one story, with echoes and rhymes,” but eventually agrees to break the novel into three parts - in exchange for the underlying publishing rights to be with LucasArts and ILM. He spends the next year editing and revising _The Journal of the Whills_ , ultimately excising about 900 pages of content, mostly about the backstory of the Jedi Knights and their fall, sixty years prior to the main narrative.  
  
On May 25th, 1977, Viking publishes _The Starkiller Wars_ to great fanfare. Critics admire Lucas’ transplanting of mythology to science fiction, and his lived-in, decaying depiction of a galaxy far, far away.  
  
It is not a commercial success. Lucas and Viking have better luck with his next novel, _The Psychedelic Soldier_ , which transplants Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War. Although dinged for its hopeful approach, the novel’s bleakness resonates with a generation eager to confront Vietnam. It is a runaway best-seller and wins the Pulitzer Prize.  
  
Under pressure from Lucas, Viking honors their deal regarding the _Journal_ Trilogy, publishing _Empire Rising_ in 1980, which also flops. They rush _The Final Battle_ into publication, using an earlier draft which downplays Lucas’ Vietnam allegory and emphasizes the more “childish” elements on the cover art. It comes out in 1981.

Bitter over Viking’s treatment of what he considers to be his masterwork, Lucas departs the publisher in 1982, choosing to focus solely on publishing through ILM. While he briefly considers letting the novels go out of print, his friend and fellow writer John Milius talks him out of it, saying, “The stories are too good to let the bastards win.” With new cover art that’s more in line with Lucas’ vision for the series, specifically geared towards teenagers and young adults, ILM publishes the first paperback editions of The Journal of the Whills trilogy in 1983. Lucas chooses not to revise the novels before publication.  
  
In 1984, Lucas publishes _Indiana Smith and The Temple of the Ancients_ , the first in what becomes a successful adventure-detective series about archaeologist Indiana Smith.  
  
While continuing to teach at Berkeley, Lucas writes Indiana Smith novels every couple of years. He takes a pass at high fantasy with _Oak King_ (1988), historical fiction with _Tuskegee_ (1989) and _Third Headlight_ (1990), and detective fiction with _Radioland_ (1991), but the pulpy, goofy Smith novels remain his biggest financial success. (The film adaptations, beginning in 1985, are also successful, though they soon depart from Lucas’ novels a la James Bond and Ian Fleming.)  
  
ILM becomes a successful publishing house independent of Lucas, printing some of the best and most innovative names in sf, fantasy, and horror, including Jim Henson’s lavishly illustrated puzzle book _Sarah and the Goblin King_ and Bob Zemeckis’ _Time Match_. Zemeckis is a Lucas mentee who becomes the first sf author to win a Pulitzer.  
  
In 1988, Lucas overcomes his shyness to host _The Power of Narrative_ for PBS. The show is a success, turning Lucas into a “media personality,” and generates new interest in _The Journal of the Whills_. Lucas, however, has no interest in returning to such painful material, and chooses instead to become an advocate for Americans with disabilities.  
  
Throughout the 80s and early 90s, the _Journal_ trilogy (or, the _Journals_ ) never goes out of print in paperback. With their bold, haunting covers - one every five years, it seems - the series becomes a cult classic among science-fiction and fantasy fans. Writers like Neil Gaiman, George R.R. Martin, and Michael Chabon bring it up as a source of inspiration, and the trilogy begins to rank high on “best fantasy you’ve never heard of” lists.  
  
Copies of the original trilogy are hard to find. A first edition of _The Starkiller Wars_ causes one of the earliest bidding wars on a site called AuctionWeb - later known as eBay.  
  
Lucas, for his part, does not return to the _Journals_ until 1994, when he comes across his original outline for the 2,000 page novel. Inspired to revisit the material, he begins work on completely revising and restoring the text.  
  
Perhaps out of some sense of rhyming history, or perhaps for his own amusement, Lucas asks Viking in 1996 if they’d be interested in republishing the Journals - this time in six parts instead of three.  
  
Aware of what they’d lost the first time around, Viking agrees. Although some fans disagree with the changes made to the “classic trilogy” published in 1977, the _Journals_ \- published in quick succession from 1997 to 1999, with a “definitive” single volume published in 2002 - are the best-sellers Lucas always hoped they would be. Critics admire them as well, with one calling the “definitive” volume “the Moby Dick of American genre literature” and another calling Lucas “the American Tolkien.”  
  
George Lucas dies of complications from his car accident in 2001, but not before agreeing to sell the exclusive rights to all his fiction and LucasArts properties to Disney (who wanted mostly the Indiana Smith novels).  
  
The sale of LucasArts and its collective IP remain profitable for Disney (including 2007’s Raiderland, a section of Disney World’s Hollywood Studios inspired by Indiana Smith), but despite never going out of publication again, the Journals remain unadapted. There is talk that they are unadaptable.  
  
Until now...


End file.
